Tag Archives: academic fraud

Most of the news coverage missed this: There are many fields of academia that have absolutely no patience for nonsense. While the hoaxers did manage to place articles in some of the most influential academic journals in the cluster of fields that focus on dealing with issues of race, gender, and identity, they have not…

Pieter Kroonenberg, an emeritus professor of statistics at Leiden University in The Netherlands, was puzzled when he tried to locate a paper about academic writing and discovered the article didn’t exist. In fact, the journal—Journal of Science Communications—also didn’t exist. Perhaps Kroonenberg’s most bizarre discovery was that this made-up paper, “The art of writing a…

One creative attempt to estimate how widespread such dishonesty really is involves comparisons between fields of varying “hardness.” The author, Daniele Fanelli, theorized that the farther from physics one gets, the more freedom creeps into one’s experimental methodology, and the fewer constraints there are on a scientist’s conscious and unconscious biases. If all scientists were…

This is why replication is so vital, wouldn’t you agree Paul? A study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reviewed 2,047 retractions of biomedical and life-sciences articles and found that just 21.3 percent stemmed from straightforward error, while 67.4 percent resulted from misconduct, including fraud or suspected fraud (43.4 percent) and plagiarism…

I’m not sure why I keep posting about these episodes, as they have become depressingly familiar. A major publisher of scholarly medical and science articles has retracted 43 papers because of “fabricated” peer reviews amid signs of a broader fake peer review racket affecting many more publications. [,…] Ivan Oransky and Adam Marcus, the co-editors of Retraction…

I was wondering when this would happen. The article ignores, however, the entire mechanism that allows GS to work: your citing articles are listed, so anyone can check out your citation sources, which is exactly what happened here! So rather than evidence that GS is flawed, the incident shows that it works as intended. Beall…